Sometimes immigration critics will make a watered-down version of the prudential argument. Instead of claiming that an increase in immigration will destroy the country outright, they object that immigrants inflict unnecessarily painful costs on their host nation. These costs can be roughly divided into two categories – welfare costs and crime costs.

If our nation cannot afford to give immigrants access to welfare, then the solution is simple. We should stop giving immigrants access to welfare. It does immigrants no favor to deny them both welfare and their right to immigrate.

The evidence that immigrants commit more crimes seems shaky to me. But even if it were true, it would not follow that America should restrict immigration. Immigrant groups historically cluster together in the same neighborhoods. Immigrants will bear the brunt of their own supposed costs in crime. Although we may weep for them, if we shut our eyes to the suffering they would have experienced in their native country, we are only shedding crocodile tears. It is best to let them make their own choice between living in a high-crime neighborhood in the US and a possibly higher-crime one in their home country.

I haven’t put too much effort into rebutting the externality argument for two reasons. First, many of the stronger “externality” arguments are variations on the “prudential” arguments discussed before. Second, I find it difficult to care. The mere suspicion of externalities is not a justification for denying central human rights. We could not legitimately throw poor Americans in prison just because we hoped this would reduce crime or the burden on the welfare state. Nor could we deport them to Mexico. Nor should we be able to deport poor Mexican immigrants.

The strongest argument that conservatives make against open immigration is the prudential argument. This is the only uniquely conservative argument (applied to any topic) that I ever find particularly compelling.

Civilization, conservatives like to argue, is a mysterious, fragile thing. Arguments about rights and utility are nice, but they presuppose a stable society whose roots we can never fully understand. This implies cautious prudence. Traditions and culture have evolved to safeguard civilization in ways we may not realize. A massive influx of foreigners who do not share the American love of freedom and its self-reliant ethic could undermine our democracy. If dominant American western traditions are diluted too suddenly, the cultural prerequisites for social cohesion may disappear, and America will be mired either in race wars or European style social democracy, depending on the doomsayer.

This has the form of a valid theoretical argument. But none of its specific premises are particularly plausible. For one, civilization is not as mysterious as conservatives like to argue. When conservatives used this prudential argument to attack socialism, for example, they were missing the point. The failure of socialist systems might have been mysterious to the socialists, but economists and classical liberal theorists from Adam Smith to Ludwig von Mises had already given tangible reasons why planned societies would fail to match the dynamism of the free market.

What is mysterious to me is that conservatives believe America possesses a unique culture of liberty and self-reliance. This view, inspired by a romanticized vision of the American past, is simultaneously blind to the American present. As I see it, the United States is a run-of-the-mill bloated social democracy with all of the welfare state’s hallmarks – progressive income taxes, managed social insurance for the elderly and poor, heavily regulated public utilities, free public schooling through high school (perhaps soon through college?), guaranteed health care for the elderly and now for all citizens, consumer safety regulation. What is left to be added to this cradle-to-grave behemoth? These entitlements are guarded hungrily by an electorate that only pauses to decide which problem government should “solve” for it next.

There is nothing particularly inspiring about this government. America today is only marginally different from other developed western democracies, the misconceptions of American and European leftists and rightists notwithstanding. If immigration upsets the social democratic order, so much the better. Why not suppose that determined immigrants would in fact import a culture of self-reliance now sorely lacking? One of America’s truly unique features is its immigrant heritage, its history as the product of individuals who took their destiny into their own hands and worked to build a better future. This, of course, is exactly the unique feature that “traditionalists” are trying to undo.

In point of fact, America’s immigration laws were not the product of any reasonable concern about democratic stability. Beginning most significantly with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, they were the simple product of racist sentiment toward foreign groups Americans feared or (literally) could not understand. A culture of xenophobia, evolved or no, is not worth maintaining.

What if it were in fact the case that immigrants intended to vote away notional American freedoms? This would be unfortunate. But could we stop it? We were not able to stop the current 12 million illegal immigrants who came to this country. Their children will be citizens whether conservatives like it or not. If conservatives want to worry about the electoral problems of immigration, they should worry about the problem created by alienating a huge and growing chunk of the American populace.

Some people reject arguments about rights and freedom. To these people, natural rights arguments ignore the fundamental importance of results. Humans don’t fundamentally care about means, they care about ends. That’s why they are called ends, Milton Friedman would say.

What are the results of immigration? In a capitalist society, people specialize in a certain profession and then trade their labor for the goods and services of other people. When an immigrant enters a profession, they compete with the people currently in that profession. If they provide a service at a lower cost, then people who purchase that service will have more money left over to purchase other goods and services. The total sum of human production will increase. These gains from immigration are equivalent to the aggregate gains from international trade.

Some utilitarians adopt a skewed view of utility. They value not increased productivity in general, but the increased income of the poor in particular. If immigrants enter the labor market, they may increase the total income of all Americans together, but competitive forces may decrease the incomes of the specific (poor) Americans that are most competing with immigrants. These concentrated losses are equivalent to the industry specific losses caused by international trade.

But immigrants moving into low wage industries in America are almost certainly moving out of even lower wage industries in other countries. Why else would they immigrate? A utilitarian ethic that supported immigration restrictions would value the well-being of poor Americans while ignoring the well-being of even poorer foreigners. This would be an obviously evil utilitarian ethic.

It may be inevitable for democratic processes to discount utilitarian gains to poor foreigners. But there is no reason for any individual utilitarian thinker to adopt the utilitarian constraints of their nation’s politics. Neither should a natural rights thinker accept the practical constraints of his political system as a moral constraint on natural rights. Justice is justice, whether or not it is procedurally obtainable.

Perhaps it would be nice if we could let foreigners exercise their natural liberty. But in an era of terrorism, America needs to keep its citizens safe from violent Islamist extremists. If we open up our borders, we risk another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 or worse.

This is the deeply irrelevant national security argument. It fails almost any conceivable test as a justification for the immigration legislative status quo (or most feasible restrictive alternatives to it).

The 9/11 terrorists, of course, entered the country legally, mostly on temporary visas. If immigration restrictions do not prevent terrorist attacks, then the need to prevent terrorist attacks cannot be a legitimate reason for restricting immigration.

The main immigration restrictions have nothing to do with national security. Instead, current law functions something like a lottery. A fraction of applicants to various categories of residency are admitted by an arbitrary bureaucratic review, or through an actual lottery. These quotas make life miserable for immigrants waiting to live or work in the United States, but they do nothing to prevent actual terrorists from entering the country on temporary or student visas.

In any event, American immigration is predominantly a Latin American phenomenon. Whatever prejudices Americans have about Mexicans, they are rarely suspected of wanting to wage Jihad or establish a new caliphate on American soil. Hysterical Islamophobia is not a reason to keep out Christian Latinos (or Indian Hindus, or Asian Buddhists).

The government would be morally justified in screening out specific people that it reasonably suspected of ties to terrorist organizations. I believe that even this is probably a fool’s errand. The government is not an all-seeing oracle. It is clumsy, inefficient, and operates without any proper incentives. This is one reason why, for example, it is unable to enforce our current immigration restrictions. Conservatives usually understand the impotence of government when it isn’t being used to oppress a disadvantaged minority group. How horrifically intrusive would a government need to be in order to track reliably the potential terrorist activities of the world’s more than 6 billion people? It would have a scope similar to the nightmare state from George Orwell’s 1984.

National security might be an argument for banning any foreigner from ever visiting or immigrating to America. It would be a fairly unhinged argument, but at least a logically coherent one. It might be an argument for screening immigrants for terrorist suspects in a timely fashion. But it isn’t a reason to subject low-skilled Mexicans to a 131 year wait list for an immigrant visa – effectively denying them legal entry to America.

Illegal immigrants violate American immigration laws. America is a society based on the rule of law. If we change American laws to accommodate criminal immigrants, we will be rewarding them. We will be encouraging them to break the law in the future and to scoff at the authority of law in the present. We must resist law-breaking criminals even if their crimes never end. After all, people may never stop committing theft or murder, but that isn’t a reason to stop punishing those crimes.

Or so the argument goes.

First some specificity. Granting amnesty (residency) to illegal immigrants does not incentivize people to immigrate, or to break laws. Immigrants do not break immigration laws merely because they rejoice in criminality. They break the laws because they want to immigrate, and the laws make it too hard to do so legally. The opportunities available to immigrants in America are their own incentive. Immigration amnesty simply decreases the disincentives to illegal immigration. Amnesty does not make it easier to commit murder, theft, or any non-immigration crime (one might say “real crimes”).

The right question is, should we enforce our current immigration laws? Yes, say immigration opponents, because they are the law.

This argument boils down to legal positivism – the unthinkingly amoral idea that what is right is what the law says. Under the doctrine of legal positivism, it was wrong for the American Colonies to revolt against British rule in the 1770s, wrong for black slaves to flee the plantation in the 1850s, wrong for Americans to drink alcohol in the 1920s – and it is wrong for immigrants to ignore immigration laws today.

The solution to bad laws or unjust regimes is to end them. Laws that conflict with our basic moral intuitions will never be made legitimate by brute enforcement. Enforcing unjust laws will make people cynically resent, not respect, the power of law. As I resent it today. As, I would imagine, most illegal immigrants must resent it. What person could love a legal system that treated him like an animal to be caged if caught? Illegal immigrants cannot participate in our justice system. They cannot even pay taxes. The only way to extend the rule of law to their communities is to make them legal.

Murder and theft are obvious violations of human sanctity. The law legitimately attempts to prevent these crimes. But immigration is a crime without a victim. It is a crime that is committed merely by exercising a person’s freedom to live with other consenting individuals. Enforcing these immigration restrictions makes the rule of law enemy to its legitimacy.

The case for open immigration is simple. It is simple, that is, for anyone who begins from an assumption of human freedom, rather than arbitrary authority. People should be free to live where they please. They should be free to travel. They should be able to do business or associate with whomever else is also willing.

These are obvious, basic freedoms. Because they are so basic, they are extremely important. Any more complicated freedom we could pursue would almost without fail build on them. Life in America would be unimaginable without them. My family’s history would have been impossible. Without the ability to travel across the country, my mother from Chicago and father from Rochester would never have met. My father could not have taken his current job in Kansas City to support his family. I would have been unable to attend college in Massachusetts or work in the District of Columbia. How obviously unjust would it have been to prohibit all of these things?

Just as unjust as current immigration law, in America and world-wide. All of the things my parents and I can do easily within this country are, in various arbitrary degrees, restricted or prohibited across national borders. When we forbid people from immigrating from the third world, we condemn them to a shorter lifespan beset by poverty and disease, life in tyrannous police states or corrupt kleptocracies, and the chaos of civil war. How could we defend this?

I’ll discuss and reject the possible reasons over the next couple of posts. I’ve moved through the moral argument quickly because it is simple. There is no need to make a thorough review of the strangling annoyances that exist under current law. If you do not share an instinctive appreciation for the value of human beings to live their lives freely, if you do not at least see the facialappeal of open immigration, I would suggest some introspection. What moral principles could deny the right of people to freely seek a better life?

There are many things I like about the conservative movement. The conservative Heritage Foundation, for example, espouses principles of free enterprise, limited government, and individual freedom. These are principles I share all the way down to the core of my moral vision. On many political issues I find myself agreeing with the rhetoric of conservatives and even sometimes the proposals of the main conservative political party – the Republican Party.

But on the single political issue I care most about, prevailing conservative opinion seems to me so audaciously, breathtakingly wrong that I scarcely believe that I truly have any principles in common with conservatives. Or that conservatives have any principles beyond simple xenophobia and a national collectivism.

That issue is immigration. In my hubris, I continue to hope that most conservatives simply haven’t thought the issue through. Most, though not quite all, of their rhetoric, I believe, bears this out. In the spirit of this somewhat bold assumption I wanted to take the opportunity to lay out in moderate detail why I think the arguments against open immigration are either badly wrong or wrongly bad – or both. I will be posting a new section of my argument on this blog every day for the next week and a half or so. It may take a while before I get to your favorite argument for walling foreigners off from America, but if I neglect it in this series altogether then please let me know. If the arguments I do make are weak, sound off in the comments! The sections of my argument, subject to possible revision, will be as follows:

People often accuse libertarians of being radical idealogues, of abstracting a generally appropriate principle of freedom to unacceptable extremes. Hayek complained in the Road to Serfdom that, “Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire.” Practical, reasonable people will shy away from extremes. But often there is no middle ground between defending ones principles and abandoning them completely

This, I suggest, is what many people discover when they try to compromise in health care policy. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “Obamacare” contains 5 important provisions

Subsidies for the poor

An individual mandate to buy insurance

Community Rating for premiums

Guaranteed Issue of insurance

The pre-existing conditions fix

To many practical, reasonable people, this program alltogether looks like a serious government invasion of the health care sector. The individual mandate is an obvious affront to freedom and subsidies may seem to unjustly redistribute wealth. But many people would like to compromise and pick the most carefully targeted of the five previous reforms. They will likely pick the pre-existing conditions fix.

Insurers usually refuse to cover illnesses that began before a person purchased his insurance – so called pre-existing conditions. This creates a serious problem for the uninsured sick. Many illnesses, such as cancer, require extremely expensive treatment. Most people cannot pay for treatment on their own, and if they are not treated, the illness will kill them. The fix, forcing insurers to cover pre-existing conditions, seems like a narrowly targeted reform that will help the neediest people without significantly infringing on the liberties of others.

But once insurers are forced to cover pre-existing conditions they will change their behavior. Instead of selling sick people insurance only for future illnesses, they will refuse to sell them insurance at all. So a reasonable legislator trying to pass a targeted fix must pass a second reform – Guaranteed Issue. This reform forces insurers to “guarantee” that they will offer to sell insurance to anyone who asks for it.

This still does not fix the problem. Insurers may simply offer sick people insurance at premiums they can’t afford – say, $10 million dollars a year. If legislators are unwilling to allow the uninsured sick to simply remain uninsured, they must lower prices. So they must support community rating, which forces insurers to sell insurance to all comers at the same price.

Now, legislators have passed drastic reforms that will affect all people – this is not merely targeted legislation affecting only the uninsured sick. But they still cannot stop here. There is a new problem that must be solved. If the community rating is passed, healthy people know they will be able to purchase insurance at the average rate of the insurance. They will drop out of the market, and only sick people will remain. The price of insurance will rise.

To prevent people from “gaming the system” legislators must pass the individual mandate – which forces the healthy back into the market with everyone else. Although each of the previous reforms limited freedom, an individual mandate does so in a much more conspicuous way. And it isn’t the end.

If you order people to buy insurance, you must decide how to treat the poor. It is unreasonable to order people with no income to pay premiums of thousands of dollars a year. The health care of poor people must be paid for, either by programs like Medicaid, or by subsidies of private insurance purchases.

The reasonable person who insists on helping the uninsured sick finds himself forced to embrace the whole set of reforms. This has been hard to understand for people as highly placed as Barack Obama, who attacked Hillary Clinton for including an individual mandate in her health care plan in the Presidential primary campaign before adopting it himself. It was probably hard to understand for Mitt Romney and The Heritage Foundation when they tried to craft a middle ground in Massachusetts and ended up with a nearly identical bill. And it may still be hard for Republicans to understand, some of whom have already promised not to overturn the pre-existing conditions fix, and I predict therefore, will not – and cannot – overturn any of the legislation. Sometimes, there is no middle ground, and compromise is more harmful than a radical defense of principle in extreme circumstances.

Well perhaps “artists” is too strong a word.? But check out this factoid on the now-in-theaters 2012, which I am struggling not to see:

He blew up the Empire State Building and the White House in Independence Day, sent a giant monster careering through the heart of Manhattan in Godzilla and destroyed the famous Hollywood sign in The Day After Tomorrow. But it seems there are places even Roland Emmerich will not go – the German film-maker has revealed he abandoned plans to obliterate Islam‘s holiest site on the big screen for fear of attracting a fatwa.

Or was this just a calculation based on profits?? 2012 does not seem to have been made with any other considerations in mind.

Volokh had a couple of posts up commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – here, here, and here for example.

I am too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the idea of the wall, as I learned about it later, made quite an impression on me.? The Communists had voluntarily constructed a physical testament to their citizens’ fevered desire to escape.? And once that wall came down, the beneficent West welcomed the refugees with open arms.? But because I am too young to remember the Berlin Wall, another wall looms larger in my mind.

Today, a sickening parody of the past is unfolding.? A new wall goes up along our border, and the United States is building it.? It builds it not to keep its own rich well-fed citizens trapped inside, but to keep the poor and desperate out.? The Berlin Wall made a sick sort of sense.? The Communists needed to prevent the human material of their social experiments from escaping.? But the wall today is an aimless and demented cruelty, a jeering testament to our nation’s willingness to sacrifice its own prosperity, if only it can make our neighbors a little poorer.? It denies both the citizens inside our borders and those without the best operation of the capitalist system that was once the hope of desperate East Berliners.

Once we demanded that the Soviets tear down their wall.? Today we insist that our neighbors help us seal off our border.? So today, I look forward to the twentieth anniversary of the fall of a different wall, and a time when we will have seen it for the travesty that it is.